Nomadland: A dream or a nightmare in disguise?

 Psychology of Nomadland; Frances McDormand's Fern, Psychoanalysis of Nomadland

Stark.  Barren.  Austere.  Slow.  And somehow, out of this austerity, beautiful.  Nomadland is a movie that, on the one hand, feels like a documentary – the close ups are very close and it turns out that the people in the movie are – with the exception of the stars – playing themselves.  On the other hand, this feels like a Hollywood movie.  The cinematography is good, there are shots of wonderful vistas, and the narrative storyline of the heroin, Fern (played by Frances McDormand), let’s the story tell the story – there is no need for a narrator to explain things to us.  We are pulled into a feature movie and experience it as if we were following along on a wonderful, barren, desultory, and beautiful road movie unfolding before us – moving slowly, deliberately, languidly, towards whatever end it might reach.

So what is Nomadland and who are these Nomads?  Fern has been uprooted from what became her hometown – a company town built by a mining company – when the town closed down as a result of the mine closing down.  Without enough money to quite make ends meet when using her social security, she works at Amazon to get enough scratch to take her van (named Vanguard) on the road and live in it, staying in campsites when she can afford it and parking in gas stations and rest stops when she can’t.  Intermittently she does labor; cleaning toilets at a KOA, helping with the sugar beet harvest, working at Wall Drug in South Dakota for a spell, and then, when she is down on her luck, going back to Amazon to pick up much needed cash.

In graduate school Wolfgang, my enthusiastic roommate from Germany, was interested in spending summer vacation not in our cities with our museums, but roaming our vast Western Wilderness.  I helped him map out a route and joined him for part of it, spending time in friend’s homes out west.  Wolfgang, who was studying to be a designer, was floored by the panoramic beauty and the opportunities to go on hikes under the blue dome in what we aptly call “big sky country”.  He was charmed when he was able to spend the night at the home of a Native American.  He loved hiking in our forests and climbing our mountains.

The Nomads in this film are not tourists in the traditional sense.  Fern is a widow and many of the others seem to be individuals – and individualists – who, like her, do not have the resources to “retire” and, according to the Reluctant Sister who is reading the book, to pay the rent if they are retired, and they certainly don’t drive the RV with built in washer/dryer that the nomads check out at the bright and shiny RV dealership.  So while the vernacular of being on endless summer vacation is evoked, it is false.  These are hardworking people nearing the ends of their lives who, despite having worked their whole lives, don’t have the capital that it takes to support themselves.  They are continuing to scratch out a living and they are engaged in a swap based economy with each other, but the economy is strictly cash with the mechanics who maintain their homes and the grocers who provide their food.

Our country, as one of my patients and I recently discussed, is made up of townies and nomads.  I was brought up in the nomad class – my Dad was in corporate sales and we moved 10 or 12 times before I was 18.  My patient’s father was a foreman at a factory.  They lived in the town – actually the neighborhood – which their family had lived in for generations.  She has five or six groups of relatives living within two blocks.  She is now a member of the Nomad group, transplanted to our city because of chasing the job that her college education and post graduate degree (earned in different communities necessitating several moves) has created for her.  She is wealthier than her parents ever were, but still sees their home as her home even though she is raising her family here.

I was entranced by the ingenuity of Fern’s character and the ways that she used the small space of her van to become her home.  Perhaps this has something to do with being intrigued by the Reluctant Sister’s living in a tiny house – also an extremely tight space and one that my sister has chosen, as Fern seems to have done.  In being entranced, I was drawn into this drama in a way that I am now thinking may have been subversive.  “Oh, look, isn’t that cute – you can put the cutting board over the sink, creating more counter space.”

Furthering this seduction is Fern’s character.  She has two options that would take her off the road.  Her sister lives in the suburbs in a very nice house.  The sister enters as a character when Fern is in need of some cash for that darn mechanic.  Her sister has an extra bedroom now that the kids have moved on with their lives, but Fern wants nothing to do with that life – and never has.  She has disdain for the suburban comfort and expresses that in a fight with her sister’s husband during her visit with them.

Fern also has a love interest – Dave (played by David Strathairn – the only other equity actor in the film, I think).  Fern meets him on the road.  He is a nice guy.  She keeps running into him.  She stops by his family’s house where he says he is camping out, but Fern sniffs out that he intends to stay – and she, phobic of sleeping under a roof – takes off.

Fern is, at heart, a nomad.  And this film becomes a Hollywood western – romanticizing the life of the sheriff who keeps riding into the next town as a stranger, but bringing order before moving on.  And what is wrong with that, you might want to know – don’t we nomads deserve to be acknowledged and celebrated?  Isn’t our culture about the rights of the individual – including the right to move on when the spirit so moves us?

Well, not so much for the townies.  Frankly, staying in place, watching the grandchildren’s soccer games and going to their first communion or bar and bat mitzvah’s – this is the stuff of the stable life.  I deliberately chose an academic career to put a halt to my nomadic lifestyle (which continued after I left home – amassing more moves seeking training than I had accumulated as a child).  I landed in a place that is so parochial that professionals include the name of their high school on their Curriculum Vitae – it locates them for the other professional townies who have grown up in this area, left for an education, and returned here to practice their profession.

That said, it is the Urban Core here that is more or less permanent.  This city, like many, is ringed with suburbs that are filled with the intentionally nomadic – more of them in the suburbs that are furthest from the city center.  They are working corporate jobs and come here to do that, and then to move on.  That said, some of them settle, and some of them are townies – third and fourth generation families within a suburb – perhaps with roots in the city before white flight was a thing.  They enjoy good school systems and an insular lifestyle where everyone looks more or less alike.

The people in the film who are not equity actors are not, by and large, nomads by choice.  They are people who can’t pay the rent.  They are travelling by necessity.  And the hardness of their life – portrayed in Francis' itinerant jobs – is romanticized away.  The nominal leader of the camp that provides an annual rendezvous for some of the nomads is a grounded, sincere guy who is making the best of a bad situation and helping others do the same.  We admire his stoicism.  But we are also seduced by the sense of esprit de corps, the shared vision, and the kumbaya moments around the campfire.

A review in Slate posits that the movie is set five years ago so that Trump mania does not have to muck up the works.  And this movie is not mucked up.  It manages to fly above the troubles, the cares, the inconsistencies, the problems that it both portrays, but it also makes them majestic through beautiful cinematography, a tremendous lead actress and a haunting story of her finding herself at home in places that we would find inhospitable.  See, it’s not so bad.  It’s a roadtrip…

My own profession, which requires the nomadic life to get into it, is moving towards a nomadic model as Universities have decided that tenure is no longer something that is needed.  Originally a means of protecting academic freedom, tenure became a means of keeping employees stable at an institution.  And of giving an institution that was a springboard to the nomadic life the aura of stability.  This has all kinds of benefits until there is an economic downturn and those tenured employees can’t be shed.  Also, with an oversupply of people prepared to teach, universities have discovered that those without tenure will teach more classes for less money than those who are tenured.  Unless we unionize (which some universities have done) we will be a profession that is on the open market and we will have to move to improve our lot.  The nomadic life: here we come…

The world is increasingly fluid.  Gender is no longer stable.  In the age of COVID, we have learned that we can attend and teach classes (and see our patients) from anywhere.  There are great gains associated with fluidity and acceptance of it.  But there are also great losses associated with giving up our stable, tactile, personally grounded and connected lives.  This movie would minimize those.  Retirement – It’s an endless vacation (when you aren’t working side jobs)…  Is the future – for all us – migrant labor?  Are we, like capital, going to flow around the world in an endless whirl – seeking jobs when we aren’t running from political turmoil, war, or natural disasters that may be increasingly manmade? 

If this movie wins the best Oscar on Sunday, which it may, I think we should realize that the Hollywood’s dream factory is, in very Freudian fashion, working to dress up our bleak future as something that is to be deeply desired.  Our fears are being transformed into wishes before our very eyes.  Just as the suburbs lured us out of the city and onto a particular road – so, too, this movie would suggest that the lure of the open road is woven into our DNA.  We are the people who came to a new world and we would continue to be explorers.

But I think, and this is certainly partly my own way of countering what I see as a projection on the part of the moviemakers, the stable life has virtues and is desirable.  I think it makes sense to find some earth and put a fence around it, and welcome your friends, neighbors and family to share it with you.  Fern disagrees – and that’s fine.  But don’t extend her dream to those who can’t access mine and suggest that they, too, are going to find themselves on the road…

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